Archives & Collections | Gwulo: Old Hong Kong

Archives & Collections

In an ideal world, everything would be digitised and available through our web browser. In practice, many documents are still only visible in their original, hard-copy form. If you want to see them, you'll have to make a trip to the archive.

Hare are physical archives I know of that contain information related to Hong Kong. Please leave a comment below if you can add any more.

Comments

You need to add to your list of archives in Hong Kong:

  • The Public Records Office in Kwun Tong (HKSAR Archives)
  • The Hong Kong Film Archives
  • The CLP Archives (Kadoorie Family)
  • The Hong Kong Collection at the University of Hong Kong Libraries in the Special Collections
  • The HKU University Archives (History of HKU and the HKU Family)
  • The University Archives at UST in Clearwater Bay
  • The Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch (their Journal and any of their published books, their lectures and tours, their archival collection at the PRO  and their RASHKB special collection of books at the Central Library. Their photograph collection at HKU Libraries in Special Collections.

There are many more small archives and manuscriptand and/or artifact collections  in Hong Kong belonging to various cultural institutions and churches and companies but the vast majority of archival collections will not be on line any time soon because it takes a great deal of money, time and manpower to make that happen and most archives in Hong Kong (and the world) lack the serious funding that archives on the mainland receive. If they get that kind of support heir first goal will be to get the finding aids to their collections available online and the second goal is to make actual content available.

I hope you find this helpful,

Stacy

Thanks Stacy, that more than doubles the size of the list!

Also interesting to hear some background on the problems local archives face.

Regards, David

All you need is a scanner.  If any of these small organizations want to use Gwulo to store their stuff, I'm happy to bring my home scanner to them for free and help out.  Most just keep their archives "in a box" anyway.

It does not have to be fancy, just scan, post and put them in a Gwulo Gallery and update the details of later.

 

A core collection with its own gallery featuring works depicting life, customs and landscapes of 18th and 19th Century China and Hong Kong. Some works can be viewed via their online Collection Databank.